Monthly Archives: October 2026

Paper

A handmade book is generally made of paper (I’m sure there are imaginative exceptions). So I went looking at paper for the cover of my chapbook-to-be [previous blog will explain]. Even at my local art supplies store in a suburban region, I felt a bit overwhelmed by options. But after my initial excitement about the marvelous diversity available, I settled down to think about the book, its content, its context. Color. And the feel of a chapbook in one’s hand: all of those things should rightly affect design choices, I believe.

Fancy, decorated papers are appealing, but they won’t work for this project. It’s not a cheery story. Perhaps colors of the North Korean flag? Um, no; the colors of the DPRK are…red, white, and blue! (Though a deep red is an intriguing possibility). MaryAnn Miller showed me a lovely black paper she has used for artist books, but I have decided that isn’t quite what I want, either. Anyway, aside from color, there’s also the paper’s texture to consider, and whether digital printing will work on it.

So many decisions!

Thinking about paper brings to mind my on-and-off obsession with ephemera over the years. I do love paper and things made of it, things that are probably not meant to last, and are fragile or easily destroyed. I’m not the only human who feels this way, which makes me wonder why ephemera is so appealing to some people, while granite or marble monuments are so appealing to others. I enjoy visiting Apport Used Books, the bookstore itself and its Instagram online “catalogue,” because Ben is one of the folks who finds, sells, trades, and shares postcards, letters, photos, chapbooks, poetry books, occult items, poetry broadsides, collages, and other fragile and nearly-lost things. I can drive over the hill and get my fix of wonders, though I don’t buy much because these days I’m trying to cull my own collection of books and oddments.

I also wonder why some of us write poetry, and others among us need to create architectural wonders. Which is no guarantee of lasting into the future: think of Antiochus I, whose tomb and history was lost for millenniums, while Sappho’s poetry fragments and Beowulf remained active in the minds of humans, who are certainly ephemeral creatures.

I don’t expect my current poetry chapbook project, or any work of my own, to live on after me. Paper and humans–we don’t last long on earth. Like butterflies, so temporary and so fascinating.

New project

I’ve made a decision about my chapbook-length, hybrid-poetry manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong: I’m going to make it into a handmade artist book. I came to this conclusion after meeting with artist/poet MaryAnn L. Miller (Lucia Studio), who was generous enough to listen to my ideas, explain the process(es) necessary, and encourage me to go for it even though I do not feel fully prepared to embark upon, let alone complete, such a project. For people who are thinking of doing this themselves, and for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I figured I would use my blog to write about the process. It will also serve to goad me into staying on track and actually completing it! Because you know how it goes. One gets distracted, or gets mired in details, or flags in general.

MaryAnn provided meaningful inspiration when I visited her at her studio. She has produced numerous artist books, and they are beautiful objects. Photos do not represent what a joy it is to handle an artist book–the textures of the papers, the feel of the book in hand, the subtleties of color. The book feels like a completed project, and this manuscript really needs that. Or I do, since I embarked on research about Harold Dunn in 2008 and have been working on the poems and historical excerpts on and off since then; it’s something I want to do to honor my friend David Dunn, to learn his father’s story, to help me to understand David’s story–cut short by his own early death.

I have sent the ms. to numerous chapbook publishers, but although two of them expressed some interest in the poems they also acknowledged that the layout of the work would pose challenges for their small presses. I understand that. I looked into print-on-demand options for self-publishing this text, and…let’s just say the process would not have been smooth. Since I’m not doing this to earn any profit, I may as well do it as art for art’s sake rather than tearing my hair out over tech issues. If I make only 10 or 15 books, at least I will have finished this particular project. If I consider this “artistic,” the process becomes more interesting and the result can take its time. I can make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. Which I fully intend to do.

When she learned I had long ago been in the graphic design industry as a typesetter, proofreader, and small press publisher during the time of the dinosaurs, MaryAnn reminded me to draw upon my past skills. Sure, the technology has changed, but I found that I do recall how to use a mockup for a pamphlet. I can figure pagination and signatures, and I have done quite a bit of proofreading on the computer.

However, for most of the time I was employed in academia, I did not have much opportunity to keep such techniques up to date. The first couple of years I was employed, I put together a booklet of student-written and student-illustrated work for an umbrella program through which my department was partially funded, but that part of my job ended long ago. After that, I had little reason to employ my out-of-date graphics skill set. Now, I have to recall what I know and also learn how to use it with more “advanced” software.

And that’s where I began as of this weekend (a day of pouring rain meant I felt fine about sitting at the laptop for a couple of hours). I’m starting with the text itself, with its indentations and italics and footnotes because, yes, this poem has footnotes. Figuring out how many pages of 8 x 10 Somerset Book Wove paper I’ll need per book and how the text will “sit” on each page. Thinking about cover art.

There’s much more involved, and it’s exciting. To me, at least. On next week’s blog post: more on this project and what I’ve been learning. Or else more on the garden as I put it to bed.

Who can tell?

Perspective, again

My daughter, a veterinarian, has had a wide range of experiences with animals–working at an equid center in Morocco and on a sheep farm in Scotland, observing the feeding habits of platypuses in Australia, and caring for the health and well-being of small domestic animals at veterinary centers in North Carolina, Portugal, and New Mexico. She was briefly here in Pennsylvania, recently, to participate in my mother’s memorial gathering, and one morning at breakfast I mentioned that I have been buying amazingly good sheep-milk yogurt at our local farmer’s market. “It’s so expensive, though,” I told her, “Ten dollars a quart!”

“I don’t know, that sounds a fair price, actually,” she said. “Have you ever tried to milk a sheep? It isn’t easy!”

Well, no. I hadn’t given sheep-milking a second thought. And now that I’ve looked at a few YouTube videos…let’s just say that sheep-milk yogurt is a splurge for me, but certainly a good value for the price.

Photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels.com

It’s little times like these–moments that could be so mundane–that keep me from becoming too blasé. My daughter inadvertently reminded me that I need to stay curious and not take things for granted, that while looking deeper into a topic may complicate my understanding, complexity and depth are good results! Her worldview varies from mine in interesting ways, and I always gain information from her; sometimes, what I learn finds its way into a poem (see my poem “Drought and Blood” in Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis). But aside from so-called poetic inspiration, what I cherish are those opportunities to look at experiences, places, and people from another perspective.

That’s why I love reading. I read books about history, geology, the cosmos, physics, biology, botany, philosophy, theology, economics, even entomology. It’s also one of the main purposes that people should read fiction and memoir: to get a view into how someone else thinks, lives, experiences the world.

And, of course, it’s why I enjoy poetry.

~

Here’s an excerpt from James Wright’s poem “Sheep in the Rain.” [You can read the whole poem here.]

Sheep eat everything
All the way down to the roots
And maybe that is why
These explorers of the rain
Seem so relaxed in their browsing.
Someone has freed them only a little while
Into the fields, and they have a good life of it
While it lasts.